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Nietzsche Past & Future

Eternal Recurrence Revisited

Brandon Robshaw looks again at Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal repetition of life.

I read Friedrich Nietzsche with a mixture of admiration, amusement, outrage, and exasperation. His philosophy is the antithesis of the kind of philosophy I usually like to read and to do (that is to say, analytic philosophy), and I cannot read him for very long at a stretch. It’s like listening to a man talking at the top of his voice all the time, and it becomes wearisome. But his writing is extremely rich, stimulating, and crammed with ideas.

One particular idea of his has always intrigued me: the idea of eternal recurrence (or eternal return, as it is also known).

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